In the fall of 2013, Sylvia Mendez Elementary School in South Berkeley turned into a dual immersion school, where students learned in both English and Spanish. The Berkeley Unified School District Two-Way Immersion (TWI) program starts in kindergarten at Sylvia Mendez and then follows into Longfellow Middle School. Elementary school students are immersed in almost entirely Spanish, with very little of their classes involving any English. As students move up in grade, the amount of English being used in the classroom increases, until it’s almost equal to Spanish by fifth grade.
The community that forms during the TWI program stays with students from the very beginning of elementary school all the way up to high school. “I really loved the community because a lot of the people in that program I got to know during elementary school, and then I was in classes with them all the way up until high school,” Malia Ruiz, a sophmore at Berkeley High School who went through the TWI program, said. After nearly a decade of school with the same people, she is still friends with a lot of students from the program.
The program is for grades K-8, meaning that TWI students have a lot of options for Spanish classes when they get to BHS. Lucien Manrique Abramowitsch, a freshman at BHS and a TWI alum, shared how when he started high school he surprisingly realized the value of going back to the basics. “In middle school I didn’t take a class for Spanish, and I think the Spanish class itself is really useful, and it’s teaching me a bunch of (grammatical tools) that I didn’t know,” Manrique Abramowitsch said.
Valeria Alonso-Franco, BHS senior and TWI alum, said she thinks that Longfellow pushes students to critically think in Spanish in addition to learning basic communication. She explained how students at Longfellow had their history and science classes in Spanish, meaning they had to write essays, analyze texts, and comprehend a wide variety of complex topics in the language.
However, because TWI had a somewhat unique curriculum, sometimes students have challenges integrating into more traditional classes. Lin Reid, a junior at BHS and TWI alum, expressed how her English grammar skills were well below average by the time she was in middle school. “(Something I found difficult was) not learning a lot of English grammar fundamentals that other kids learned and having to make up for that outside of school,” Reid said.
One benefit of the program is that, by being bilingual, TWI alumni can have an easier time connecting with others that speak the same language. Alonso-Franco explained how her ability to translate has been helpful for her family and friends. “If someone doesn’t speak one of the languages, or if they don’t speak it a lot, then I can help with translating,” Alonso-Franco said.
Students of Latinx and Hispanic heritage in the TWI program gain a setting dedicated to centering their culture and learning about its history, and all students gain the benefits of the program’s bilingualism.